generalspeaking

Thursday, November 29, 2012

Universal Peace and Goodwill

"They can get pieces of paper from the UN but they are not going to move peace forward, they are not going to make a Palestinian statehood more real.
"They boycott Israel. They refuse to talk to us. Who do they plan to make peace with?"
Mark Regev, Israeli government spokesman

Who to make peace with? None in particular. Perhaps the PA and Mahmoud Abbas, operating an illegal government, one which hangs on despite a lack of legal authority through the polls which voted a majority share of responsibility to Hamas, and with which group Fatah has a severe, irreconcilable falling-out, has no idea how next to proceed, but by fumbling ahead.

He may not have a legal mandate to rule the West Bank through elections that are promised but never held for fear of yet another popular vote that will this time boot Fatah out of the running and acclaim Hamas triumphant in the political home of Fatah, but he has sought legal standing in the United Nations, and there, where a gross collective misunderstanding of the most elemental principles of human rights reign supreme, that standing was conferred.

Not nationhood, but nascent nationhood affirmed. Nationhood without subterfuge could have been achieved but since it was never authentically striven for through the creation and management of all the infrastructures and structures of a meaningful and working national institution of government with all its responsibilities effectively in place and pursued, Palestinians have satisfied themselves with the pale imitation.

Why make peace with Israel when there is no will nor wish to do so? The straitjacket of an invincible hatred has achieved a status difficult to dissolve through mere face-to-face negotiations. The potent imagery of an enemy whose ardent pursuit of military punishment for impoverished, victimized refugees who have never risen above international beggar status is one that more than adequately fills the national aspiration.

The impassioned plea with which PA President Mahmoud Abbas addressed the General Assembly used imagery and words that belied authenticity and reality, an invention of the mindset of a people incapable of working toward an amicable conclusion to too many long years of strife and turmoil. This is Fatah, remember, which saw birth as the Palestine Liberation Organization dedicated to the destruction of Israel.

And if they were unable to destroy Israel itself because of its collective will to endure, they did their utmost with ferocious determination to slaughter as many Israelis as possible. That torch was handed on to Hamas, with Fatah taking a diplomatic bow from perpetuating conspicuous violence, resorting instead to the violence of incendiary slander aimed toward a most appreciative audience, both at large and within the United Nations.

Observe: "Palestine comes today to the General Assembly because it believes in peace and because its people, as proven in past days, are in desperate need of it,” he said, insisting that recognizing “Palestine” as a non-member observer state is “the last chance to save the two-state solution."

"We have heard and you too have heard specifically over the past months the incessant flood of Israeli threats in response to our peaceful, political and diplomatic endeavor for Palestine to acquire non-member observer state in the United Nations,” said Abbas. “And, you have surely witnessed how some of these threats have been carried out in a barbaric and horrific manner just days ago in the Gaza Strip.

“We have not heard one word from any Israeli official expressing any sincere concern to save the peace process. On the contrary, our people have witnessed, and continue to witness, an unprecedented intensification of military assaults, the blockade, settlement activities and ethnic cleansing, particularly in occupied east Jerusalem, and mass arrests, attacks by settlers and other practices by which this Israeli occupation is becoming synonymous with an apartheid system of colonial occupation, which institutionalizes the plague of racism and entrenches hatred and incitement."

This is a masterfully outstanding example of inverse reasoning, beloved of those who succeed in mastering the art of slanderous propaganda, portraying themselves as innocent victims of a malignant power intent on using any horrific means possible to obliterate a rival challenger for ownership of a territory that will empower the winner to emerge triumphant in its final possession.

The vote to accommodate the desire of the Palestinian Authority was overwhelmingly in favour. A paltry few moral-minded UN members voted against, with yet another relative handful abstaining and a few absenting themselves with deliberate aforethought. Canada, stating its position as favouring a two-state solution requiring the Palestinian Authority to return to the bargaining table and talks with Israel was blunt about its "no" vote.

"That will not be accomplished, in reality, unless and until the Palestinian Authority returns to the negotiating table and is able to get a comprehensive peace agreement with Israel. And we will not support any other shortcuts, or any other ways of trying to arrive at that solution without such a peace agreement."
Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper

But symbolism can be a powerful aphrodisiac. The Palestinian Authority has already signalled its preparedness to join other United Nations committees, such as a reactivated UN Anti-Apartheid Committee, and another for membership in the Forum against Racism and Discrimination, and in all likelihood ask permission to lodge a case against Israel at the International Criminal Court, which with UN nationhood recognition it may do.

Israel, slurred and labelled as anti-Apartheid provides powerful, colonialist, imperialist imagery that the non-aligned-countries bloc find most appealing, and prepared to accept in their generalized loathing of the Jewish State. Israel in fact is meant to be a Jewish state. It favours and prides itself as a Jewish state. Not too different from the states that surround it in the Middle East which give citizenship to their own and none other, unlike Israel.

The truth of the matter is, Israel has no partner for peace. It has a neighbour that has demonstrated, time and again, that it is not averse to expressing its racial hatred of Jews, and its contempt for a religion other than Islam. That neighbour looks too for a Final Solution. One that would permanently remove Israel from the map of the Middle East and return it in its entirety to the Arab/Muslim world.

It is a desire that has a wide acceptance in that neighbourhood. Which, for over sixty years has engaged in its utmost endeavours to engineer that final scenario. Despite which, their distorted logic, which has wide appeal outside the Middle East as well, is that Israel is the aggressor, the racist, the Apartheid state, the genocidal agent in the area, the nation that must be destroyed to bring peace.

And, with Israel absent from the scene, the Arab countries would finally find the peace they claim has been absent since the intolerable engineering of an earlier incarnation of the United Nations still reeling from the effects of the Second World War, and not yet overtaken by the zeitgeist of exalted victimhood status turned judge and executioner, under the rubric of universal peace and goodwill.